So I am now living the Liquid Glass Horror, and…it’s not what I expected.

Based on the screenshots and the complaints, I was expecting special effects overkill, a phone trying to look like a PS5 game trying to look like Minority Report.

But…

…it’s not even that. It’s just ugly. Bad layouts. Bad margins. Bad proportions. Awkward animations. Flickers and flashes. Content peeking through all the negative space so that the screen is filled with visual noise. It feels designed by committee. It feels pasted together.

The feel of Apple products has covered a lot of ground over the decades. They’ve felt elegant. They’ve felt basic. They’ve felt bauble-y and cute. They’ve felt futuristic. They’ve felt practical. But this is the first time I can recall an Apple product feeling •cheap•.

@inthehands My biggest objection to things like this is less about how things look and more about how unnecessary User Interface changes affect my flow state. For me for iOS 26, this was 95% about Safari.

For anyone else affected this way, the good news is you can quickly make Safari mostly like iOS 18 by switching to "Bottom" layout.